If you want to walk a higher faith, you must draw nearer to God. The nearer you want to be to God, the greater you will have to be sanctified. “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
Where you lack sanctification, you will lack the anointing.
You cannot walk in the power of the Holy Spirit unless you are being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. The one precedes the other.
Never settle for anything less than the life God has meant for you to live. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you…” (Jeremiah 1:5). Be that man or woman God has ordained for you to be.
Sanctification of a saint is where the natural life is overcome by the spiritual life, where the man is overcome by God.
It is not the miracles through you that make you different, but the miracle that God does in you. That miracle is the sanctification done in you by the Holy Spirit. “…God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit…” (2 Thessalonians 2:13).
What is sanctification
In the Bible, the word “Qadash” is translated into holy, consecration, set apart and sanctification. It means to be different, to not be something for the world, but for God. It is what God did for the Sabbath, and what God wants to do in you.
Sanctification is the process of changing you from an earthly natural man to a heavenly spiritual man. Sanctification moves you from the old you to who you were meant to be.
We are saved in a moment but will be sanctified across a lifetime.
Sanctification is not losing things but being set free from them. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).
Sanctification separates. Stop trying to fit in where you don’t belong.
Many cannot erase the image of who they were. Your past does not define you, God does.
Sanctification is the process whereby the right to your life is surrendered over to Christ, parcel by parcel. The process is only complete when there remains no ground in your life upon which you can stand and say, “mine”. “Or do you not know that…you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Sanctification must be upon our minds, because the outward actions are merely the result of what we think on.
What does sanctification do for you?
Salvation gets you into heaven, but sanctification determines your position once you get there.
The greater your calling, the greater your sanctification must be.
The greater the sanctification, the less you must change between earth and heaven.
Your first great deliverance is from the bondage of sin. Your second great deliverance is from the bondage of self. The first comes by the blood of Christ alone. The second comes by the power of the Holy Spirit alone. Both require the surrendering of yourself that you would receive the gift, first of salvation, then sanctification.
You cannot belong to God and still be prostituting yourself to the world. Sanctification separates the man from the world.
Who can be sanctified?
Everyone can be sanctified, but only some will yield such that they will be.
Stop telling God what He cannot do, and He just might do it.
It is good that you would live your life for Jesus. But the higher calling is that you would die for Him. As long as you value your own life more than His, you are not worthy of Him. “And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:38-39). Salvation is free, but sanctification will cost you your life.
It is when we reach the end of ourselves that we begin our walk with God. We embrace the mediocrity of self, thinking it is everything, when it is nothing. The greater sanctification is not from the world but from yourself.
There is no other way, to separate there must be a separation. Do what you know you need to do. Then do more. Change begins where excuses end.
How are you sanctified?
So long as you are at the helm of your sanctification, you will fail miserably.
God sanctifies the saint. “And you shall keep My statutes, and perform them: I am the Lord who sanctifies you” (Leviticus 20:8).
Sanctification is not something you do, but that the Holy Spirit does to you. The only thing you can do is to either surrender or resist. Everyone saved will be sanctified, but only to the degree that they surrender.
The Word sanctifies. The Lord Jesus said, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:17).
What a work in us that He does! That sometimes we think Him either absent or reckless in the process, unable to see today what can only be correctly seen from tomorrow. Yet as we gain each new level of sanctification, we can remember back to the prior, and though we may not see the plan, we can trust and know that He can.
Are you ready to see the wonders of God? “And Joshua said to the people, ‘Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you’” (Joshua 3:5).
Blessings to you,
Paul
All Scripture is in blue and uses the NKJV (New King James Version) translation unless otherwise noted.